Game On

 

The Wii U was release just in time for Christmas. It seemed like a likely candidate to become a hot ticket item for the 2012 holiday season, but Nintendo was met with disappointing sales. When the original Wii was released for the 2006 holiday season, it was very difficult to find. Then in 2007 the console shortage continued. The Wii was a huge success, but it wasn't able to produce longterm interest in the Nintendo brand name. This year I was able to locate the Wii U on store shelves in the weeks leading up to Christmas, a surefire sign that the Wii U had underwhelming sales.

Now Sony and Microsoft are getting ready to release new systems, I'm looking forward to seeing what they have to offer. I'm just a casual gamer. I can be convinced to buy a new gaming system, but I'm not going to be standing outside a store to get it in its first hours of release. I like to wait for the reviews of both the system and its games. 

What I'd like to emphasis is that I am interested in the quality of the games, and that is what Nintendo is lacking. With the Wii, I feel like they focused way too much of motion control and not enough on the quality of the games. The idea of motion control seemed cool, but people lost interest over time. When Xbox released the Kinect, people became more interested in that, which is just an add on. Motion control is not required to use the Xbox 360, but you can have motion controlled games if you're willing to upgrade to the Kinect.

For the next generation of gaming, I want to see a stronger focus on the games. The Wii U does not yet have a huge title, and I think that is holding back the sales. Now that information about the Playstation 4 is trickling in, it seems that the focus on games is uncertain. The PS4 may not have backwards compatibility with games from previous generations, which would hurt sales. The PS2 was a very successful system and gamers do not want to retire all of their old games.

It also seems like gaming systems are going to focus on computer content. The ability to connect with other gamers and stream online content is going to be on all the systems. While I do like this, every electronic device does things like this. Even my phone gets me online, so this is not a stand out reason to buy a gaming console.

I'm sure I'll buy at least one of the next generation gaming consoles, but I want to see quality games. It's not a race to release the console fastest (if it was, Nintendo would have won), it's more of a race to be the first to produce quality content.